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Banana boon

Published 15 September 2001

From
Emile Frison, International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain

As coordinators of the world’s first project to sequence the genome of the banana(21 July, p 7),
we’d like to reassure correspondents such as David Jones(4 August, p 50)
who fear that genetic modification programmes will replace
non-GM programmes to breed better bananas. Information from the sequencing
project will speed up all efforts to improve the banana, whether conventional,
GM or otherwise. Once researchers have identified a gene which helps to protect
bananas against disease, for example, they can screen large numbers of
conventionally bred varieties while they are still plantlets to see if they too
have the …